Catch-22 (6 page)

   ‘Then why doesn’t he ask you to?’

   ‘Because he’s crazy,’ Doc Daneeka said. ‘He has to be crazy
to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can
ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.’

   ‘That’s all he has to do to be grounded?’

   ‘That’s all. Let him ask me.’

   ‘And then you can ground him?’ Yossarian asked.

   ‘No. Then I can’t ground him.’

   ‘You mean there’s a catch?’

   ‘Sure there’s a catch,’ Doc Daneeka replied. ‘Catch-22.
Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.’ There was only
one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own
safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a
rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask;
and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more
missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if
he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have
to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very
deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a
respectful whistle.

   ‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’ he observed.

   ‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agreed.

   Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness.
There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was
graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn’t
quite sure that he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about
good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby’s eyes. He had Orr’s word
to take for the flies in Appleby’s eyes.

   ‘Oh, they’re there, all right,’ Orr had assured him about the
flies in Appleby’s eyes after Yossarian’s fist fight with Appleby in the
officers’ club, ‘although he probably doesn’t even know it. That’s why he can’t
see things as they really are.’

   ‘How come he doesn’t know it?’ inquired Yossarian.

   ‘Because he’s got flies in his eyes,’ Orr explained with
exaggerated patience. ‘How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got
flies in his eyes?’ It made as much sense as anything else, and Yossarian was
willing to give Orr the benefit of the doubt because Orr was from the
wilderness outside New York City and knew so much more about wildlife than
Yossarian did, and because Orr, unlike Yossarian’s mother, father, sister,
brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor
and newspaper, had never lied to him about anything crucial before. Yossarian
had mulled his newfound knowledge about Appleby over in private for a day or
two and then decided, as a good deed, to pass the word along to Appleby
himself.

   ‘Appleby, you’ve got flies in your eyes,’ he whispered
helpfully as they passed by each other in the doorway of the parachute tent on
the day of the weekly milk run to Parma.

   ‘What?’ Appleby responded sharply, thrown into confusion by
the fact that Yossarian had spoken to him at all.

   ‘You’ve got flies in your eyes,’ Yossarian repeated. ‘That’s
probably why you can’t see them.’ Appleby retreated from Yossarian with a look
of loathing bewilderment and sulked in silence until he was in the jeep with
Havermeyer riding down the long, straight road to the briefing room, where
Major Danby, the fidgeting group operations officer, was waiting to conduct the
preliminary briefing with all the lead pilots, bombardiers and navigators.
Appleby spoke in a soft voice so that he would not be heard by the driver or by
Captain Black, who was stretched out with his eyes closed in the front seat of
the jeep.

   ‘Havermeyer,’ he asked hesitantly. ‘Have I got flies in my
eyes?’ Havermeyer blinked quizzically. ‘Sties?’ he asked.

   ‘No, flies,’ he was told.

   Havermeyer blinked again. ‘Flies?’

   ‘In my eyes.’

   ‘You must be crazy,’ Havermeyer said.

   ‘No, I’m not crazy. Yossarian’s crazy. Just tell me if I’ve
got flies in my eyes or not. Go ahead. I can take it.’ Havermeyer popped
another piece of peanut brittle into his mouth and peered very closely into Appleby’s
eyes.

   ‘I don’t see any,’ he announced.

   Appleby heaved an immense sigh of relief. Havermeyer had tiny
bits of peanut brittle adhering to his lips, chin and cheeks.

   ‘You’ve got peanut brittle crumbs on your face,’ Appleby
remarked to him.

   ‘I’d rather have peanut brittle crumbs on my face than flies
in my eyes,’ Havermeyer retorted.

   The officers of the other five planes in each flight arrived
in trucks for the general briefing that took place thirty minutes later. The
three enlisted men in each crew were not briefed at all, but were carried
directly out on the airfield to the separate planes in which they were
scheduled to fly that day, where they waited around with the ground crew until
the officers with whom they had been scheduled to fly swung off the rattling
tailgates of the trucks delivering them and it was time to climb aboard and
start up. Engines rolled over disgruntedly on lollipop-shaped hardstands,
resisting first, then idling smoothly awhile, and then the planes lumbered around
and nosed forward lamely over the pebbled ground like sightless, stupid,
crippled things until they taxied into the line at the foot of the landing
strip and took off swiftly, one behind the other, in a zooming, rising roar,
banking slowly into formation over mottled treetops, and circling the field at
even speed until all the flights of six had been formed and then setting course
over cerulean water on the first leg of the journey to the target in northern
Italy or France. The planes gained altitude steadily and were above nine
thousand feet by the time they crossed into enemy territory. One of the
surprising things always was the sense of calm and utter silence, broken only
by the test rounds fired from the machine guns, by an occasional toneless, terse
remark over the intercom, and, at last, by the sobering pronouncement of the
bombardier in each plane that they were at the I.P. and about to turn toward
the target. There was always sunshine, always a tiny sticking in the throat
from the rarefied air.

   The B-25s they flew in were stable, dependable, dull-green
ships with twin rudders and engines and wide wings. Their single fault, from
where Yossarian sat as a bombardier, was the tight crawlway separating the
bombardier’s compartment in the plexiglass nose from the nearest escape hatch.
The crawlway was a narrow, square, cold tunnel hollowed out beneath the flight
controls, and a large man like Yossarian could squeeze through only with
difficulty. A chubby, moon-faced navigator with little reptilian eyes and a
pipe like Aarfy’s had trouble, too, and Yossarian used to chase him back from
the nose as they turned toward the target, now minutes away. There was a time
of tension then, a time of waiting with nothing to hear and nothing to see and
nothing to do but wait as the antiaircraft guns below took aim and made ready
to knock them all sprawling into infinite sleep if they could.

   The crawlway was Yossarian’s lifeline to outside from a plane
about to fall, but Yossarian swore at it with seething antagonism, reviled it
as an obstacle put there by providence as part of the plot that would destroy
him. There was room for an additional escape hatch right there in the nose of a
B-25, but there was no escape hatch. Instead there was the crawlway, and since
the mess on the mission over Avignon he had learned to detest every mammoth
inch of it, for it slung him seconds and seconds away from his parachute, which
was too bulky to be taken up front with him, and seconds and seconds more after
that away from the escape hatch on the floor between the rear of the elevated
flight deck and the feet of the faceless top turret gunner mounted high above.
Yossarian longed to be where Aarfy could be once Yossarian had chased him back
from the nose; Yossarian longed to sit on the floor in a huddled ball right on
top of the escape hatch inside a sheltering igloo of extra flak suits that he
would have been happy to carry along with him, his parachute already hooked to
his harness where it belonged, one fist clenching the red-handled rip cord, one
fist gripping the emergency hatch release that would spill him earthward into
the air at the first dreadful squeal of destruction. That was where he wanted
to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like
some goddam cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl
while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and
billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking,
staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and
tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them
all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire.

   Aarfy had been no use to Yossarian as a navigator or as
anything else, and Yossarian drove him back from the nose vehemently each time
so that they would not clutter up each other’s way if they had to scramble
suddenly for safety. Once Yossarian had driven him back from the nose, Aarfy
was free to cower on the floor where Yossarian longed to cower, but he stood
bolt upright instead with his stumpy arms resting comfortably on the backs of
the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, pipe in hand, making affable small talk to
McWatt and whoever happened to be co-pilot and pointing out amusing trivia in
the sky to the two men, who were too busy to be interested. McWatt was too busy
responding at the controls to Yossarian’s strident instructions as Yossarian
slipped the plane in on the bomb run and then whipped them all away violently
around the ravenous pillars of exploding shells with curt, shrill, obscene
commands to McWatt that were much like the anguished, entreating nightmare
yelpings of Hungry Joe in the dark. Aarfy would puff reflectively on his pipe
throughout the whole chaotic clash, gazing with unruffled curiosity at the war
through McWatt’s window as though it were a remote disturbance that could not
affect him. Aarfy was a dedicated fraternity man who loved cheerleading and
class reunions and did not have brains enough to be afraid. Yossarian did have
brains enough and was, and the only thing that stopped him from abandoning his
post under fire and scurrying back through the crawlway like a yellow-bellied
rat was his unwillingness to entrust the evasive action out of the target area
to anybody else. There was nobody else in the world he would honor with so
great a responsibility. There was nobody else he knew who was as big a coward.
Yossarian was the best man in the group at evasive action, but had no idea why.

   There was no established procedure for evasive action. All
you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or
Hungry Joe, more fear than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the
idea that he must die someday. Yossarian had not resigned himself to that idea,
and he bolted for his life wildly on each mission the instant his bombs were
away, hollering, ‘Hard, hard, hard, hard, you bastard, hard!’ at McWatt and
hating McWatt viciously all the time as though McWatt were to blame for their
being up there at all to be rubbed out by strangers, and everybody else in the
plane kept off the intercom, except for the pitiful time of the mess on the
mission to Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and began weeping
pathetically for help.

   ‘Help him, help him,’ Dobbs sobbed. ‘Help him, help him.’

   ‘Help who? Help who?’ called back Yossarian, once he had
plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out
when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly
into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian
helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which
Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and
leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the
buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully
only a moment before. Oh, God! Oh, God, oh, God, Yossarian had been pleading
wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of the ship by the top of
his head, unable to move.

   ‘The bombardier, the bombardier,’ Dobbs answered in a cry
when Yossarian spoke. ‘He doesn’t answer, he doesn’t answer. Help the
bombardier, help the bombardier.’

   ‘I’m the bombardier,’ Yossarian cried back at him. ‘I’m the
bombardier. I’m all right. I’m all right.’

   ‘Then help him, help him,’ Dobbs begged. ‘Help him, help
him.’ And Snowden lay dying in back.

   Hungry Joe did have fifty missions, but
they were no help. He had his bags packed and was waiting again to go home. At
night he had eerie, ear-splitting nightmares that kept everyone in the squadron
awake but Huple, the fifteen-year-old pilot who had lied about his age to get
into the Army and lived with his pet cat in the same tent with Hungry Joe.
Huple was a light sleeper, but claimed he never heard Hungry Joe scream. Hungry
Joe was sick.

   ‘So what?’ Doc Daneeka snarled resentfully. ‘I had it made, I
tell you. Fifty grand a year I was knocking down, and almost all of it
tax-free, since I made my customers pay me in cash. I had the strongest trade
association in the world backing me up. And look what happened. Just when I was
all set to really start stashing it away, they had to manufacture fascism and
start a war horrible enough to affect even me. I gotta laugh when I hear
someone like Hungry Joe screaming his brains out every night. I really gotta
laugh. He’s sick? How does he think I feel?’ Hungry Joe was too firmly embedded
in calamities of his own to care how Doc Daneeka felt. There were the noises,
for instance. Small ones enraged him and he hollered himself hoarse at Aarfy
for the wet, sucking sounds he made puffing on his pipe, at Orr for tinkering,
at McWatt for the explosive snap he gave each card he turned over when he dealt
at blackjack or poker, at Dobbs for letting his teeth chatter as he went
blundering clumsily about bumping into things. Hungry Joe was a throbbing,
ragged mass of motile irritability. The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet
room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.

   ‘Listen, kid,’ he explained harshly to Huple very late one
evening, ‘if you want to live in this tent, you’ve got to do like I do. You’ve
got to roll your wrist watch up in a pair of wool socks every night and keep it
on the bottom of your foot locker on the other side of the room.’ Huple thrust
his jaw out defiantly to let Hungry Joe know he couldn’t be pushed around and
then did exactly as he had been told.

   Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless
face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the
blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. It was a
desolate, cratered face, sooty with care like an abandoned mining town. Hungry
Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips of his fingers, stammered,
choked, itched, sweated, salivated, and sprang from spot to spot fanatically
with an intricate black camera with which he was always trying to take pictures
of naked girls. They never came out. He was always forgetting to put film in
the camera or turn on lights or remove the cover from the lens opening. It
wasn’t easy persuading naked girls to pose, but Hungry Joe had the knack.

   ‘Me big man,’ he would shout. ‘Me big photographer from Life
magazine. Big picture on heap big cover. Si, si, si! Hollywood star. Multi
dinero. Multi divorces. Multi ficky-fick all day long.’ Few women anywhere
could resist such wily cajolery, and prostitutes would spring to their feet
eagerly and hurl themselves into whatever fantastic poses he requested for
them. Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of
frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening
manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be
measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for
employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in
his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he
was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting
moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away.
He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had
found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it
almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by
the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never
came out, and Hungry Joe never got in. The odd thing was that in civilian life
Hungry Joe really had been a photographer for Life magazine.

   He was a hero now, the biggest hero the Air Force had,
Yossarian felt, for he had flown more combat tours of duty than any other hero
the Air Force had. He had flown six combat tours of duty. Hungry Joe had
finished flying his first combat tour of duty when twenty-five missions were
all that were necessary for him to pack his bags, write happy letters home and
begin hounding Sergeant Towser humorously for the arrival of the orders rotating
him back to the States. While he waited, he spent each day shuffling
rhythmically around the entrance of the operations tent, making boisterous
wisecracks to everybody who came by and jocosely calling Sergeant Towser a
lousy son of a bitch every time Sergeant Towser popped out of the orderly room.

   Hungry Joe had finished flying his first twenty-five missions
during the week of the Salerno beachhead, when Yossarian was laid up in the
hospital with a burst of clap he had caught on a low-level mission over a Wac
in bushes on a supply flight to Marrakech. Yossarian did his best to catch up
with Hungry Joe and almost did, flying six missions in six days, but his
twenty-third mission was to Arezzo, where Colonel Nevers was killed, and that
was as close as he had ever been able to come to going home. The next day
Colonel Cathcart was there, brimming with tough pride in his new outfit and
celebrating his assumption of command by raising the number of missions
required from twenty-five to thirty. Hungry Joe unpacked his bags and rewrote
the happy letters home. He stopped hounding Sergeant Towser humorously. He
began hating Sergeant Towser, focusing all blame upon him venomously, even
though he knew Sergeant Towser had nothing to do with the arrival of Colonel
Cathcart or the delay in the processing of shipping orders that might have
rescued him seven days earlier and five times since.

   Hungry Joe could no longer stand the strain of waiting for
shipping orders and crumbled promptly into ruin every time he finished another
tour of duty. Each time he was taken off combat status, he gave a big party for
the little circle of friends he had. He broke out the bottles of bourbon he had
managed to buy on his four-day weekly circuits with the courier plane and laughed,
sang, shuffled and shouted in a festival of inebriated ecstasy until he could
no longer keep awake and receded peacefully into slumber. As soon as Yossarian,
Nately and Dunbar put him to bed he began screaming in his sleep. In the
morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an
eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse.

   The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial
punctuality every single night he spent in the squadron throughout the whole
harrowing ordeal when he was not flying combat missions and was waiting once
again for the orders sending him home that never came. Impressionable men in
the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry
Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they would begin to have shrieking nightmares
of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night
from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the
darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds.
Colonel Korn acted decisively to arrest what seemed to him to be the beginning
of an unwholesome trend in Major Major’s squadron. The solution he provided was
to have Hungry Joe fly the courier ship once a week, removing him from the
squadron for four nights, and the remedy, like all Colonel Korn’s remedies, was
successful.

   Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions
and returned Hungry Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stopped and Hungry Joe
settled down into a normal state of terror with a smile of relief. Yossarian
read Hungry Joe’s shrunken face like a headline. It was good when Hungry Joe
looked bad and terrible when Hungry Joe looked good. Hungry Joe’s inverted set
of responses was a curious phenomenon to everyone but Hungry Joe, who denied
the whole thing stubbornly.

   ‘Who dreams?’ he answered, when Yossarian asked him what he
dreamed about.

   ‘Joe, why don’t you go see Doc Daneeka?’ Yossarian advised.

   ‘Why should I go see Doc Daneeka? I’m not sick.’

   ‘What about your nightmares?’

   ‘I don’t have nightmares,’ Hungry Joe lied.

   ‘Maybe he can do something about them.’

   ‘There’s nothing wrong with nightmares,’ Hungry Joe answered.
‘Everybody has nightmares.’ Yossarian thought he had him. ‘Every night?’ he
asked.

   ‘Why not every night?’ Hungry Joe demanded.

   And suddenly it all made sense. Why not every night, indeed?
It made sense to cry out in pain every night. It made more sense than Appleby,
who was a stickler for regulations and had ordered Kraft to order Yossarian to
take his Atabrine tablets on the flight overseas after Yossarian and Appleby
had stopped talking to each other. Hungry Joe made more sense than Kraft, too,
who was dead, dumped unceremoniously into doom over Ferrara by an exploding
engine after Yossarian took his flight of six planes in over the target a
second time. The group had missed the bridge at Ferrara again for the seventh
straight day with the bombsight that could put bombs into a pickle barrel at
forty thousand feet, and one whole week had already passed since Colonel
Cathcart had volunteered to have his men destroy the bridge in twenty-four
hours. Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be
liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an
ambition. Instead of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the
barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the
plane with one wing plummeted. He had lived innocuously for a little while and
then had gone down in flame over Ferrara on the seventh day, while God was
resting, when McWatt turned and Yossarian guided him in over the target on a
second bomb run because Aarfy was confused and Yossarian had been unable to
drop his bombs the first time.

   ‘I guess we do have to go back again, don’t we?’ McWatt had
said somberly over the intercom.

   ‘I guess we do,’ said Yossarian.

   ‘Do we?’ said McWatt.

   ‘Yeah.’

   ‘Oh, well,’ sang McWatt, ‘what the hell.’ And back they had
gone while the planes in the other flights circled safely off in the distance
and every crashing cannon in the Hermann Goering Division below was busy
crashing shells this time only at them.

   Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer
his men for any target available. No target was too dangerous for his group to
attack, just as no shot was too difficult for Appleby to handle on the
ping-pong table. Appleby was a good pilot and a superhuman ping-pong player
with flies in his eyes who never lost a point. Twenty-one serves were all it
ever took for Appleby to disgrace another opponent. His prowess on the
ping-pong table was legendary, and Appleby won every game he started until the
night Orr got tipsy on gin and juice and smashed open Appleby’s forehead with
his paddle after Appleby had smashed back each of Orr’s first five serves. Orr
leaped on top of the table after hurling his paddle and came sailing off the
other end in a running broad jump with both feet planted squarely in Appleby’s
face. Pandemonium broke loose. It took almost a full minute for Appleby to
disentangle himself from Orr’s flailing arms and legs and grope his way to his
feet, with Orr held off the ground before him by the shirt front in one hand
and his other arm drawn back in a fist to smite him dead, and at that moment
Yossarian stepped forward and took Orr away from him. It was a night of
surprises for Appleby, who was as large as Yossarian and as strong and who
swung at Yossarian as hard as he could with a punch that flooded Chief White
Halfoat with such joyous excitement that he turned and busted Colonel Moodus in
the nose with a punch that filled General Dreedle with such mellow
gratification that he had Colonel Cathcart throw the chaplain out of the
officers’ club and ordered Chief White Halfoat moved into Doc Daneeka’s tent,
where he could be under a doctor’s care twenty-four hours a day and be kept in
good enough physical condition to bust Colonel Moodus in the nose again
whenever General Dreedle wanted him to. Sometimes General Dreedle made special
trips down from Wing Headquarters with Colonel Moodus and his nurse just to
have Chief White Halfoat bust his son-in-law in the nose.

   Chief White Halfoat would much rather have remained in the
trailer he shared with Captain Flume, the silent, haunted squadron
public-relations officer who spent most of each evening developing the pictures
he took during the day to be sent out with his publicity releases. Captain
Flume spent as much of each evening as he could working in his darkroom and
then lay down on his cot with his fingers crossed and a rabbit’s foot around
his neck and tried with all his might to stay awake. He lived in mortal fear of
Chief White Halfoat. Captain Flume was obsessed with the idea that Chief White
Halfoat would tiptoe up to his cot one night when he was sound asleep and slit
his throat open for him from ear to ear. Captain Flume had obtained this idea
from Chief White Halfoat himself, who did tiptoe up to his cot one night as he
was dozing off, to hiss portentously that one night when he, Captain Flume, was
sound asleep he, Chief White Halfoat, was going to slit his throat open for him
from ear to ear.

   Captain Flume turned to ice, his eyes, flung open wide,
staring directly up into Chief White Halfoat’s, glinting drunkenly only inches
away.

   ‘Why?’ Captain Flume managed to croak finally.

   ‘Why not?’ was Chief White Halfoat’s answer.